OUCH! Free Content gets hurt by enabled Ad Blockers

People may “like” you on Facebook, but never send a penny your way. At the same time, if you have lots of social media admirers, it’s probably a sign that your business is doing well.

The confusing but intriguing question of how much a Facebook like is worth is raised by PC World’s Brad Chacos, who enlisted the help of a company that builds stores and shopping cards on the social media platform. Ecwid had compared the sales of the companies using its storefronts with the numbers of likes received, with interesting results. It thus assigned a dollar value to each like.

Some of the companies had a pretty poor return on their likes (with an average of 21 cents per like) while others “earned” as more than $20 per like. Obviously, this was determined purely through correlating the data, but the bottom line seems to be that “likes” aren’t just a quantity that can be measured.

Ergo, one certainly shouldn’t expect to grow a business by buying fake “likes” (or followers, in the case of Twitter).

Customer engagement on social media is what makes money, regardless of what the numbers say.